Harbinger (15 page)

“Sorcha always said you were an old bat.” The words popped out before he could stop them.

Madame Vashill laughed and filled her mortar with more herbs. “I was when I was in Vermillion. Stuck in a trade my father had taught me, and when he died, a husband I despised made me continue it. I find I like this life better. When you get to my age, you learn to appreciate these little moments.” She gestured over her shoulder.

Raed turned and saw what she meant; around Raed and the old woman was a community of people, all thrown together by conflict, but still getting on, doing things, looking after one another. Lay Brothers caring for the sick and the injured while others came in bringing them food and supplies. It was—when examined closely—a well-oiled machine.

A machine.
The Rossin’s voice bubbled to the surface. The Beast was nearer today than any day before, a consequence of breaking loose and not having fed, Raed assumed. A sharp tang caught his attention, and it was not a natural substance that burned his nostrils.

Dropping his pestle back to the bench, Raed turned as if he were being pulled on a string. “Excuse me,” he murmured to Madame Vashill, and he began to circle the room like a dog seeking a bone.

Lay Brothers shot looks at him—mostly annoyed that he was in their domain—but they kept out of his way. The Young Pretender ignored them all. Instead, he began to listen to the Beast inside him. The geistlord was, after all, more powerful than he and had sharper instincts. It stung him to admit that—but there it was.

A strange place to bring her leftovers.
The Rossin growled, shifting deep inside Raed, who knew at once he was speaking of Sorcha. He felt the Beast was uncomfortable too.
A bastion of her greatest enemy.

It was hard for Raed to talk to the creature without seeming like he had run mad. The lay Brothers were eagle-eyed for such things and might whip him off into a bed if he wasn’t careful.

“The Circle had all these outposts originally,” he hissed as he made a great show of peering at the shelf of ointments and lotions. “She hardly had a choice.”

Then she shouldn’t be surprised with what happened two nights ago.
The Rossin sounded very self-satisfied.

Ignoring the Rossin’s barbed observation, Raed nonetheless proceeded with a little more caution. The sense of unease he and the Rossin shared led him over to a rack of shelves on the far wall. At present they were stocked with the lay Brothers’ meager supply of liniments and ointments. They barely took up a corner of this vast shelf.

Raed ran his eyes over the rack suspiciously up close and then stepped back to examine how it stood against the wall. His father’s rickety palace had been full of hidden rooms and corridors, and he wondered if it was the same in the citadel.

He was certain that the smell and the sense of unease were coming from here. Raed shot a glance over his shoulder, to ascertain that no one was watching him, and then ran his hands over the wood.

The shelves were beautifully carved with all manner of forms that were obviously meant to be various geists; there was the pair of staring malevolent eyes that had to be a darkling, the spinning whirlwind of a vortex, and one he knew very well, the beautiful, deadly form of a Murashev in all her painful glory.

And everywhere on the bookshelf were the stars that were the symbol of the Ancient Native Order. Raed frowned. The fact that the lay Brothers were moving around, ignoring him and this bookcase meant that they had complete confidence in it. Sorcha and her Sensitives had carefully examined every surface of the citadel before they’d moved into it and made it their base.

They would not have missed any kind of cantrips or runes.

That is because they refuse to acknowledge the rest,
the Rossin purred into his brain.

“Rest?” Raed whispered under his breath.

You saw the pitiful Sensitive become not so pitiful. You saw it and decided to ignore it. You never questioned what it meant.
The Rossin dug up the memory that he had brushed aside; how Merrick had brought a whole street of people to their knees outside the Emperor’s prison.

He rubbed the space between his eyebrows and muttered into his shoulder, “What does that have to do with this?”

It was the first time he’d ever heard the Rossin call his family great—mostly the Beast just belittled them as traitors and weak. Raed let out a faint snort as he realized that most likely the Beast was talking about his own involvement with his ancestors. Literally, his blood was in the Rossin line.

Putting that aside, Raed leaned forward and examined the shelf. He recognized most of the geists, but one that stood out to him was his own sigil. It was the one that the
Dominion
had sailed under—the rampant Rossin. Without thinking overly on it, Raed reached out and traced the shape of it. Under his fingers it felt sharp. It was a curious thing to see here in the remains of an old citadel of the Order—and what’s more, it looked freshly carved.

Raed was about to turn around and inquire if anyone else had noticed this, when the world went cloudy and gray. The hustle and bustle of the lay Brothers and their patients faded to incomplete shadows, while the sounds reached him as muted whispers.

Move!
The Rossin was like a sharp burr under his skin, but one he could not shake or rip off. Hesitantly, Raed took a step forward. He knew about the rune Voishem, but the fact that he was experiencing it firsthand—without an Active Deacon—was terrifying.

He didn’t need to ask whose blood. Merrick and Sorcha had told him all about Derodak and the fact that he was the first Emperor. The knowledge settled in his stomach like a stone.

The Rossin remained silent.

The sensation of moving through the wall was every bit as unpleasant as Sorcha had described it to him; every particle of his being screamed to turn and race back to the real world. The image of being trapped in stone by this abrupt appearance of Voishem was foremost in his mind.

However, the Young Pretender did not have time to panic because the stone wall behind the shelves was not thick at all. He pushed through and arrived on the other side. As he reappeared back into the normal physical world, he glanced back at the wall he had just passed through. Even though Raed knew it was true, he couldn’t help running his hand over the rough rock.

Someone had made Voishem into the wall itself, perhaps to avoid detection from the Sensitives outside. Raed’s jaw tightened as he realized there could only be one group capable of crafting such a thing—the very people who had let in chaos the night before.

Raed flicked his head around, realizing that a faint light was gleaming in the tunnel he now occupied. This, clearly, was how the saboteur had infiltrated the citadel.

That lying traitor, Derodak!
The great cat sounded almost as angry as Sorcha had been. The Rossin’s hatred of the Circle of Stars was embedded in more than just recent events. It was all because Derodak, their leader, had been both first Emperor and first Deacon, and it was he who the Rossin had made the deal with. Apparently being trapped in the Imperial bloodline was not what the geistlord had envisaged when he had struck the deal with the first Emperor. He still carried an intense hatred for Derodak and anything he had created.

Deep within his host the great cat uncurled and against the back of Raed’s eyes everything was suddenly awash in golden light.

You cannot deal with a Deacon,
the Rossin reasoned with the Young Pretender,
but I can.

The Beast spoke the truth; sword and pistol would be very little use against a Deacon of the Circle of Stars. However, if he let the Rossin have his way, there would be nothing left of the traitor but blood.

Raed ground his teeth hard. He could go back and find the Deacons, but by that time the traitor could have disappeared. And besides, if he was honest with himself, he wanted to do something for Sorcha. She’d carried so many burdens for these last months, and he had felt at a complete loss to assist in any way. It would be good to be able to bring something to her for a change.

In the tight confines of the tunnel, Raed hastily stripped off his clothes, and let the Beast take over. It was getting easier and easier to do that.

The human was correct. It was getting even easier by the moment. The Young Pretender’s mind was weakening, which gave the geistlord hope that the Fensena was right. He would soon have his way. However, right now there was vengeance to be dealt out.

The Rossin shook his great mane and crouched down. The corridor was awash in the smell of human, and suddenly his lust for blood boiled up inside him again.

It was strange that the Young Pretender knew very little of his progenitor or the power he gained from both the Rossin and Derodak. That was the way with humans; they learned so very little in their time. His host had apparently chosen to forget the power they had tasted beneath the streets of Vermillion when facing the Murashev.

The Rossin had not however. He would have that again.

His long, rough tongue ran fleetingly over his nose. For now, there was one Deacon to deal with. He might not be of the line of Emperors, but he still shared the great traitor’s blood. The Beast could smell it on him.

Crouching low, the Rossin began to stalk forward. The light grew brighter quickly because the tunnel was not very long at all—nothing more than a bolt-hole really. It was merely someplace where the infiltrator could work his craft out of sight of the other Deacons.

On huge but well-padded paws, the Rossin stalked the human at the end of the corridor. His target was so engrossed in what he was doing that he didn’t notice golden eyes watching him from the semidarkness. The great pard was intrigued and for a moment merely observed.

Derodak in his cleverness seemed to have outdone himself. The Rossin had little experience with machines; they had always been the preserve of the Ehtia, the Ancient race that had been the cause of the breach into the Otherside. The geistlord hunkered down and let his senses, natural and preternatural, run over the device the cloaked figure was hunched over.

It was gleaming brass, with many intricate parts that moved over its surface and reminded him of scuttling insects. He did recognize some things about it though; the flicker of three weirstones within its boxlike shape and also the writing carved on every surface. Cantrips were scored in the metal, and he knew immediately that they were not the usual kind, though he’d seen them before.

They were necromantic cantrips, which made perfect sense when the cloaked figure sliced at his own outstretched arm and dribbled blood into the vial at the end of the device.

The Rossin’s tongue unconsciously licked over his nose once more. Blood was an Ancient source of power—especially the right blood. It could infuse a geist with strength, let the future reveal its secrets, or open up a little gap into the Otherside. That was why killing was always the last resort of the Deacons of the Order; the path for a geist was easiest when blood was spilled or death was summoned.

Yet now here was this man sacrificing his own blood to a machine; a machine that seemed to grow brighter as the blood trickled into it, and the weirstones began to vibrate. The sound they made was so high-pitched that the mere human could not have heard it, but to the Rossin it was like jabbing spikes into his brain.

Unable to contain himself, he rose to his feet with a roar that shook the rock, and for a moment drowned out the unholy noise the machine was making. The man hunched over it spun around and raised his hands instinctively in defense.

He had no marks of any of the runes on him, but he had a pistol primed and ready. His shot could hardly have gone wild in these tight confines, but its impact on the great pard’s shoulder was as effective as a bee sting. The Rossin did not know the man’s name or face, but he was so enraged by the machine and the pitiful attempt at self-defense that he sprang forward.

In the small space he could not leap as effectively as he would have wanted, but he still fell on the cloaked man like a crazed storm of teeth and claws. In the struggle, the machine was knocked over, breaking the glass vial that had funneled the blood and cracking the metal case. Two of the weirstones rolled free from their settings and bounced across the floor like a child’s marbles.

The Rossin was tearing out the man’s guts while he beat with decreasing vigor on the pard’s head. Eventually he stopped altogether, and the Rossin gave him a final shake, as if he were a rat. With his jaws dripping in gore, the geistlord glanced at the machine. It appeared broken, but there was a familiar smell in the air.

It was the fetid air of the Otherside. Something was coming.

Leaving the corpse where it had fallen, the Rossin turned about and bolted back the way they had come. The cantrip doorway accepted the blood on his jaws, just as it had accepted Raed’s, and he flew through the stone as if it were paper and he a circus tiger.

Covered in gore, the Rossin landed in the infirmary. To say the lay Brothers were excited by his arrival would have been a grand understatement. They might be men of science and healing, but a blood soaked leonine form in their domain was quite a shock.

The Rossin took little note of the chaos that he caused. He did not hear the cries for help, nor see the lay Brothers rushing to remove their patients from his way. He had his senses locked on something else altogether, and his mind was racing over all the possibilities of what it could be. At best a simple rei, at worse the Murashev.